NASA said goodbye to the Insight program after more than four years of service on the Red Planet.
The Mission Control team announced the demise of the Mars probe on Wednesday, December 21, after two failed attempts to contact the rover.
The team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Insight’s “death” was caused by the vehicle’s batteries running out of power — which agency engineers dubbed a “dead bus.”
The last time the lander made contact with Earth was on December 15, but mission control decided to declare the mission over if Insight missed two contact attempts.
On Tuesday, the official Insight account on Twitter posted what is believed to be the last image taken by the Martian rover.
Insight has detected more than 1,300 earthquakes using a French-made seismometer, including many caused by meteor strikes, since landing on Mars in 2018.
“I witnessed the launch and landing of this mission, and while saying goodbye to a spacecraft is always sad, the amazing science done by Insight is cause for celebration,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a statement. The seismic data alone from this probe provides tremendous insights not only into Mars but also into other rocky bodies, including Earth.”
The final image of Insight shows the seismometer, the Seismic Structure Interior Experiment (SEIS), as a circular, dome-shaped instrument.